Foursquare has just released a new mobile app, Foursquare for Business, to serve as an extension to the existing merchant dashboard, giving businesses the ability to manage specials and view recent activity and analytics from their mobile devices.
Foursquare for Business promises to help businesses attract customers, drive traffic and learn more about customer habits and behavior. The app allows business owners to post Foursquare updates including photos to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, view recent check-ins, and manage Foursquare specials.
The photos above show the app dashboard, where business owners can view their location’s all time check-ins and check-ins for the day, as well as customer likes and top customers. The photo on the right shows how businesses can create updates for their Foursquare account and then automatically post them to Facebook and Twitter as well.
To use the app, you need to have already signed up for a Foursquare account and claimed your business’s location. Merchants can also use the app to manage businesses that have multiple locations. However, the app won’t allow you to post updates to more than one location at once.
Businesses using Foursquare online could already run specials, post updates to their local Foursquare followers, see recent customer check-ins, and do pretty much everything they can do on the new mobile apps. But even though the app doesn’t necessarily give business owners any brand new functions, the ability to manage your Foursquare account from a mobile app when the consumer experience on Foursquare mainly takes place in a mobile app may be beneficial for businesses.
It can also simply save time and make life a little bit easier for business owners who have a lot of tasks to manage already.
There are currently about one million business owners using Foursquare to reach out to customers. The app is free and available in the App Store and Google Play.
Nice move. I hope they continue to improve their business offering.